Souls left in darkness

I don’t understand what is happening in the world these days. For example, I thought things were getting better between First Nation people and non-Natives in this country. There has been so much bad history involving violence, residential schools, and hundreds of years of colonization. It seemed that under a federal Liberal government and with the new sensitivity in our developing civilization that life was getting better for my people.

To realize that a young Native man by the name of Colten Boushie was shot in the head by Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer who claims he believed he was being robbed, is inexcusable. The fact that Stanley only received a $3,000 fine and a ban on owning a firearm for 10 years has outraged Native people across Canada. Yes, there are a lot of problems with the entire story, but the fact is you just don’t shoot to kill people and then try to call it an accident. We pride ourselves as having better gun laws and more sanity when it comes to that issue in Canada, but in a lot of ways we don’t. Here is one example when one gun was used too freely to solve a problem.

A quote by Victor Hugo, the great French author who wrote Les Miserables, touched me a long time ago: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed, the guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”

Our prisons in Canada are full of First Nation and other minority peoples who have had terrible lives and have been raised in situations full of poverty, violence and addiction. The same is true south of the border and in many other countries. When we keep people down and we don’t provide them with equal opportunities, how do we expect that they won’t turn to crime and addictions?

I thought we were making headway in this area, but no longer. The same is true of how we treat people in other countries. When we aligned ourselves with countries and governments that are controlled by big oil, we ended up bombing the Middle East for decades. We have killed thousands upon thousands of people with all kinds of propaganda created to make them look evil, so that we can grab their oil. Then we wonder why many of them want to flee the countries we have bombed into the Stone Age and have become refugees with the hope of coming to one of our countries that are relatively safer.

We are living in evil times. Our own governments and people who run them are going along with this stuff. How are we ever going to end up with a world where people have good lives, access to clean water, enough food and decent housing? It all boils down to the fact that the greedy wealthy few who control most of the wealth of this world don’t care about anything else other than in making more money. Most of the wars in history have been based on people’s desires for more money and power. The common man and woman have been used to fight these wars under all kinds of pretences.

I understand that our global history has mostly to do with war. However, you would think that maybe in 2018, we would be trying to develop a better life on this planet for everyone. What is wrong with hitting the pause button, stopping for a minute and asking that question?

Are we going to just keep following the money guys down this evil trail of violence and destruction because a handful of people make a big profit out of it all? Why don’t we think about these things more? Are we too caught up in our own lives? It is too scary to think about? Do we think that as long as our bellies are full, we have clean water to drink and we have nice houses to live in that things will always be okay for us? I don’t think our future generations can count on that because if we do nothing to lobby our governments and convince them that we don’t want to live in a world full of war, it could very well be through accident or intention that our civilization on this planet will cease to exist under the threat of global nuclear war.

I think Victor Hugo had a great insight and I hope that we can find a way to follow his philosophy.